Podcast Summary:
Ever wonder how a book becomes Braille? Or how an employee manual turns into an audio file? The students of the Summer Transition Program (STP) at the University of St. Thomas got to see it all firsthand! During their visit to State Services for the Blind’s Communication Center, students explored the magic behind accessible formats—meeting the tech wizards who make it happen and learning about assistive tools that could power their future. They heard about the recording booths, checked out the Braille department, and even learned how Radio Talking Book delivers news and magazines 24/7. Oh, and there was plenty of popcorn! With mock interviews, peer mentors, and chances to ask all the questions, it was a day packed with fun, learning, and mind-opening moments. For blind and low vision students ready to take on college, careers, and more, this behind-the-scenes adventure was a taste of what’s possible—with the right tools and support.
To find out more about the services provided at State Services for the Blind, and what they can do for you, contact Shane DeSantis at shane.desantis@state.mn.us or call Shane at 651-385-5205.
Full Transcript
Jeff: Welcome to Blind Abilities. I’m Geoff Thompson. The summer transition program, held at the University of Saint Thomas campus, empowers blind and low vision students ages 14 to 21 through a ten day residential experience. Focus on independence, career readiness, and daily living skills. The program blends assistive technology, mobility, training, and peer connections to help students confidently prepare for their futures. And each year, the STP students get a tour of the Communications Center at SSB. State services for the Blind in Minnesota. They engage in mock interviews and learn from the assistive technology specialists about the latest assistive tools that can optimize their preparation for their future education and career goals. 24 students attended this year’s tour, and the SSB staff was excited and ready.
Shane: Welcome to State Services for the Blind. My name is Shane DeSantis. Great to have you at our office.
Jeff: Shane DeSantis, the transition coordinator, went through some opening, welcoming and details and then handed it off to two college student peer ambassadors.
Shane: I’m gonna hand it over to Amy and Maddy. They’re gonna do a little experience with you guys and get to know all of you a little bit more.
Maddy: Hi, I’m Maddy.
Amy: And I’m Amy, and we’re peer ambassadors at SSB state services for the blind in Minnesota.
Maddy: If you’re wondering what a peer ambassador is, Amy and I were really here as a resource for students and transition age individuals in Minnesota. We’re here to really connect students not only to just state services for the blind, but really to each other, and kind of strengthen that community and educate students on various skills relating to blindness. And yeah.
Amy: Yeah, we’re just here as a resource. And we think it’s so important to have people who are around the same age as transition students to connect with you guys, because we know what’s going on. We know how students are feeling. So we’re just here.
Maddy: We’re available to students, want to have one on one conversations with us. We can talk about really anything. So as soon as you just want to talk about stuff that they’re interested in or if they want to, you know, have a conversation about accommodations in school or self-advocacy, and they just want to talk to someone their age and your different perspective, like we’re available for that. We’ll also be creating and hosting some events for students.
Amy: Yeah, we really want to really strengthen the community here in Minnesota because, you know, ever since Covid, everything’s been online and we really want to bring people together, you know, online as well, but mostly in person, because we found that a lot of people really connect well with each other when they’re in person and they can talk face to face. So we really want to hopefully plan something fun over the summer? We’re thinking like a picnic. Or I was thinking maybe like a pool party, but I don’t know, like logistically how that would work out. But just like something fun where we can hang out and not always talk about skills and training, which is important, but it’s also important to interact with each other socially, and we really want to have fun together.
Maddy: For sure.
Voices in Background
Teu: Hey, this is Teu, transition work opportunities. Navigator at Minnesota SB state service for the blind. And today is STP day Summer Transition program where myself, Shane, transition coordinator and a couple of other staff got some activities going on for the students. We’re going to be just sharing a little bit about SSB, the communication center, doing some mock interviews, doing some labor market information training and doing some talking about assistive tech, too. A little bit of everything. Yeah, STP day.
Jeff: Tell me about mock interviews.
Teu: Mock interviews. We’re going to have a Cate counselor share a little bit about a mock interview or some interview tips. Once Cate goes over some of these interview tips, we’re going to go over some mock interviews where we got some questions prepared to ask the students.
Jeff: Great experience for them.
Teu: Yeah. That’s right. And so some of these students might not have had, uh, interviews yet. So this could be a good introduction for them to gain some exposure. Practice a little bit. Get their feet wet.
Jesse: My name is Jesse Anderson. I’m one of the assistive technology specialists with SSB, and I primarily work with transition students. We do a lot of assistive technology assessments, trying to figure out what technology they need for high school college employment, others like summer jobs and transition activities. That kind of a thing. And during this afternoon’s, uh, STP day at SSB, I will be just talking a little bit about what I do, what SSB does as far as technology goes and how we can help students wherever they’re at. Just try to answer any questions that people have. And yeah, that’s about it.
Jeff: So during an assessment, a student could actually get evaluated on seeing if a Braille note or a certain laptop or whatever type of device best suits them.
Jesse: Basically, during a tech assessment, sometimes we’ll meet virtually and sometimes we’ll meet in person. It just depends. We look at what types of technology someone might need, but we really look at like what technology do they currently have or have access to or have? Are they familiar with? But also what are they trying to do? Like what are their short term long term goals? And then matching that along with what their vision level is, you know, matching that with what their needs are. So if somebody is low vision and they’re going to be attending college, they might look at low vision magnification software for the computer. We might look at CCTV, of course. We’ll look at smartphone and tablet type stuff or blindness. You know we’ll look at if there are Braille reader braille displays, note takers, that kind of a thing. But also computer skills are so important regardless. So we always kind of try to address using a computer, having those skills. So you’re ready for college or employment. We work with the low vision store quite a bit and our other vendors. And so, you know, if we have technology or they have technology, we help people find what they need to be successful.
Jeff: Do you ever get a situation where someone didn’t even realize that piece of equipment existed, and it just opens up doors for them?
Jesse: Oh, absolutely. There’s everything from like, people will have their phone and they’re like, oh, I didn’t know my phone had that. And I’ll show them some of the built in accessibility features, and then I’ll show them some of the apps that are available. You know, anything from being able to scan and read paper documents now using AI to describe visual information, book reading apps, any number of things. But yeah, I mean, as far as other devices, again, different models and sizes and types of CCTVs or Braille displays, devices. We’re getting into things like the meta Ray Ban glasses or other wearables that can be helpful. So yeah, I mean, there’s always new stuff. I mean, I’m learning about new stuff, and I try to follow this stuff regularly and it’s hard to keep up with it all, so. Absolutely.
Jeff: Well, thanks for staying up to date on all that stuff.
Jesse: Sure. I try. We try.
Teu: What do you want to do?
Students: Harvard.
Teu: Harvard. All right, all right. So what do you guys think? Throw some numbers. What? What is our graduation rate for Harvard?
Students: Maybe, like 70%. I’m 1%.
Teu: I heard 70, I heard 1%. Cool. So assuming that you made it into Harvard. Yeah. Which is 98% of students graduating.
Students: You said 98? Another state university. Winona State.
Teu: All right, let’s hear it. So we’re playing the game of Winona State. We want to know, hey, what is our dice roll chance at graduating at Winona State. All right. So the numbers are in. And Winona state is looking at 65. Yep 65%. I got a question here. All right. All right. So the question is 35% of those students didn’t graduate. The question is, what can we do to make sure that we don’t get bagged?
Students: Work hard. Don’t be stupid.
Teu: All right, that’s fair.
Students: advocate for yourself and ask for the help that you need.
Teu: Advocate for yourself. All right. And ask for what you need. Ok.
Students: Time management.
Kate: We’re gonna have you do practice interviews. And so what better to get you prepared for your practice interview. But do, like, a quick little competition Is about interviewing. Show of hands. I know you answered this earlier. Who of you have had an interview for something before? Cool. Cool.
Dress professionally. What does that mean?
One last question. How many of you have filled out an application or have a resume? Show of hands. One more time. So, like, almost half.
Jeff Behl: I’m Jeff Behl, supervisor of audio services. So every summer we get a visit from our student transition program and we call them our STP kids. These are high school students who are nearing graduation and deciding what they want to do post high school. So for some, that will mean further schooling. For some that will mean entering the workforce. And we give them a tour of our communication center to show them how we can help them be successful going forward. So for example audio services. My department, we do custom recording of literally anything people send us. So that might be a college textbook. It could be an employee manual. We just recorded the updated Costco stores employee manual to help them attract and retain blind, low vision and other print disabled people. But when I say literally anything. Last year finished recording ten years worth of a lady’s handwritten daily journals for her daughter, and her daughter wanted to hear her mom’s daily journals. So it took us a long time because ten years of daily journaling. But that was a major accomplishment. We also recorded for one of our college students in Duluth what’s called the DSM five. And what that is, it’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders recognized by the American Psychiatric Association. So as you can imagine, it’s some very deep, very heavy reading. And of course, because it was a college student, she had deadlines where she needed certain sections of the book to coincide with what was going on in her class. So we assigned it to multiple people.
I think we had 18 different voices on that, but that was well over a thousand pages, and we were able to get the book completed in audio format for this student, and she was able to pass her class. We’re very fortunate in that we have volunteers who come in and record for us. So at this point, we’ve got approximately 35 to 40 volunteers who record for audio services. The majority of them come here in the building where we have 20 different recording booths. They’re small. They’re not much bigger than an average clothes closet, but there’s a recording computer in there and they are soundproof, and we try to provide the highest quality, professional quality recording that we can. So once we talk about audio services, we explain to students these days they generally aren’t interested in the NHL’s digital book players because it sets them apart. They want to blend in with their peers, of course. Right. Teenagers. So what we are able to do is we can create a digital audio file of a human voice book and send it to their email account, for example, so they could listen to it on their computer or they can listen to it on their smartphone. Human voice is overwhelmingly, at least from what I’ve been told, the preferred voice that people want to hear. Because human voice, people when they’re reading, know where to place the emphasis how to tie all of the words together. So an entire paragraph makes sense. We also can provide computer voice audio, but regardless of how good that has gotten over the past few years and will continue to improve with the advent of artificial intelligence, right now, human voice is still better than computer voice, but if you have a really fast turnaround time, as we know, sometimes students don’t know what their syllabus is going to look like until a few days before the class starts, we can do the computer voice. We try really hard to meet people’s deadlines, and of course, we ask for as much lead time as they can possibly give us. But more often than not, we will use multiple volunteers on a book to speed up the process. So John might read it from nine to noon on Monday, and Lynn might read it from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday afternoon. And that way, by rotating it among multiple people, we can expedite the recording. Once in a while, we’ll get a request for a single voice, not normally, but once in a great while, and we make sure people understand we’re happy to do that. But our volunteers generally only come in one day per week. So that means that whatever you want in a single voice may take quite a bit longer to get that completed for you, but we can do that. So in addition to telling the students about audio services and how we could be helpful to them, whether it’s in the workplace or in further schooling, we also take them to our Braille section.
Jeff Behl: Are any of you not familiar with the NLS Book.
{Recording Sound plays}
Jeff Behl: I’m just going to hand it around.
Student: Is that you?:
Jeff Behl: No, that is not me.
Student: Well similar though.
Jeff Behl: Well we can put your book. We can put it on a cartridge and you can play it back on those book players which are on loan.
Student: Totally free?
Jeff Behl: All of our services are free, no charge. So, as you’re going forward with your lives and with your careers and with your schooling, please keep us in mind if you need anything made into an audio format. So I only get to have you guys for about ten minutes, and our ten minutes is almost up already. So if you would please follow me. We’re going to continue up. We’re in kind of a triangle shaped room right now. We’re walking up the right side of the triangle. At the very top of the triangle is the Braille section. And Braille folks want to tell you what they do and how they can possibly be of help as well. Okay, so follow my voice and full speed ahead.
Students: Go straight. You go to your left. And I am to your right.
Jeff Behl: And our Braille staff explain how their process works for when they create a Braille version of a book, whether it’s college, math or English or whatever it might be. Braille has their own process for providing that in Braille format. Everybody, this is Jay Roscoe.
Jay: Guys, come on in.
Jeff Behl: Jay is the supervisor.
Jay: In this way. We got plenty of room of the Braille. Grill. You’re welcome.
Chris: All right.
Jay: These are the Braille cards. You can pass them around, or we can take them. There you go. That’s how librarian Vicki Roberts. Say hy. Vicki.
Vicky: Hi.
Jay: Vicky is making popcorn today. So this is the Braille section. What we do here, we do print textbooks for the students in the state of Minnesota. We have an interagency agreement with the Department of Education. They fund this every year, and then whatever books they want to put in Braille, we will transcribe. This is a literature book. If they want this book in Braille, we’re transcribing. But first we find out if another braille vendor already braille this into braille. If they did, we make the purchase. So whatever the print is we’ll put it in Braille. It can be Spanish. German. It doesn’t matter. Calculus, physics. We put it into Braille. We have, twelve employees here. Six braille is one braille library and two proofreaders. And so this is our busy time of the year because we have to get ready for the school year, which starts in August. So every year we do about 300 textbooks. A third of those are in our backup library. Third that we purchase and the third that we have to transcribe.
Students singing g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y and Z.
Now I know my Braille AVC’s next time won’t you sing with me.
Jay: This is Pat Barrett. Pat. Tell the group what you do.
Pat: Hi, guys. Part of what I do is proofread the Braille books. I happen to be blind, but I use a closed circuit TV to read the print. And I was just working on something with Nick back here, who is reading the Braille. So we’re checking the accuracy of it. I also work on doing the thermal form for the copying, the maps and graphs and things like that.
Jay: This is Allison O’Dea and Nick Cottrell. They proofread all the braille that we do. Allison, tell me what you do.
Allison: I’d probably proofread some of your books if you guys have Braille readers. We proofread all of our transcriptions that are done here. We take turns. We have a copy holder who reads the print aloud, and I read the Braille, and we take turns reading aloud the print and the Braille, and we make sure that numbers are correct, that maps are correct. Yeah.
Student: If you have one thing wrong, like one mistake, do you have to re-Braille the whole thing?
Allison: They can correct it.
Nick: They have digital software.
Allison: Yeah, they have software that they.
Nick: Make the correction.
Chris: Big job.
Allison: Yeah. When you when you type a paper, do you ever do it without making a mistake?
Students: No, no.
Allison: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s how we proofread everything.
Nick: My job is the exact same as Allison’s. It is reading textbooks, making sure that they don’t have any mistakes, making sure they’re as good as possible. And after that, sending them to the transcribers with all my notes and all my corrections.
Allison: How many of you are Braille readers?
Jay: I have some more popcorn. I will get some more.
Students: Oh, thank you.
Jay: I’ll get some more.
Students: Oh, okay. Okay.
Jay: You’re all good to go. Then I’ll get some more popcorn, I’m going to get some more popcorn.
Pat: Yeah, plenty of popcorn. Thank you for coming.
Students: Thank you.
Nick: All right.
Pat: Thanks for coming. Bye, guys. Have fun. Learn lots.
Chris: Come on., I’m gonna leave you with Joe Pesci, the head of radio talking Books.
Jeff Behl: Then after that, we take them to the radio talking book, which is our 24 hour, seven day a week online radio station. And those folks talk about the different programs that are on the radio Talking book, or RTB, as we call it, the wide variety of programs, everything that you can imagine from people magazine to serious publications like The Wall Street Journal and Radio Talking Book, also broadcasts live newspapers in the mornings and in the evenings. In the mornings, they’re reading from the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press. Then in the evenings, I believe it’s the New York Times. Pretty sure. So the live newspaper reading is very popular because if you’re watching television or listening to the radio, a typical newscast, you’re only going to get maybe 30 seconds on a particular subject. With our Radio Talking Book live newspaper readers, they start with the headline of the story and read it all the way through to the end. So you’ve got the complete picture. So people seem to really like that.
Jeff: Some things are unexpected. Who would have thought that 12 bags of popcorn and 12 students would make such a perfect environment for recording Joe talking about Radio Talking Book and the online services?
Joe: …a live radio signal in these days we do all of our broadcasting on the internet. We are reading brand new books, so we’re reading books that came out within the past year or so, and a lot of the recordings that we make go on to have a life in the national library system. We do have our schedule online. It’s at MN.SSB.org. It gets you to all of the different departments that you’re learning about today in our web pages, including our live stream, you can stream us through a web browser or through a smart speaker. And the schedule is online. So in addition to the daily newspapers and the books that are prerecorded, and we also do about ten hours of periodical programs every day. So these are programs taken from specific magazines. Some get their own shows, like rolling Stone is its own hour long broadcast. National Geographic and then other ones are grouped by subject. So, there’s a show about teens. There’s a show about elderly people, there’s a show about animals, a show about the workplace, a show about multiculturalism. If you can think of it, we probably have a show that caters to it. And the content that we’re reading is cultivated from different newspapers and magazines. We’re terribly interested in Catering to our listeners. So if you look us up online, you’d like what we’re doing, and there’s something that you would like to hear that we’re not currently recording. I am very open to your suggestions. Uh, we try to get everything on the air that people ask for.
Jeff: The students then rotated and the other 12 students did job interviews, while the other 12 started their tour of the communication center at SSB.
Shane: How are you doing?
Student: Great, Shane.
Shane: Are you coming back from the tour or did you do a mock interview?
Student: I did a tour.
Shane: Do you want to do a mock interview with My co-worker Layla?
Student: Absolutely!
Shane: Do you want To play mentor?
Layla: Oh, great.
Student: All right.
Shane: Well, Layla’s right here.
Layla: Yeah.
Student: Doing great, Layla. So excited to do the interview.
Layla: All right.
Jeff Behl: So the tour is typically 45 minutes to an hour, and we try to make it very relaxed, very conversational. I encourage people to blurt out questions. There’s no such thing as a dumb question, and we try to make it as much fun as we can.
Jeff: To find out more about all the programs at State Services for the Blind, contact Shane.DeSantis at state.mn .us. That’s Shane.DeSantis at state.mn.us.
Be sure to contact your State Services for the Blind, your Voc Rehab, and find out what they can do for you. Live, work, read, succeed.
[Music] [Transition noise] –
When we share-
What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities